Walmart Text Spam and How to fight it!

Interesting text messages!

I’ve had a long weekend doing some stuff and I happen to get two different text from two different numbers, with the same text.   Now you if you’ve been an avid reader of this blog, you know I REALLY HATE SPAM!  I even talked about blog referrer spam and how it just looks bad on companies.  

Text Numbers So far:

310-435-9136

214-600-2674

You have been selected for a $1,000 Walmart GiftCard, Enter code “FREE” at http://www.walmart.com.xxx.biz/wm/ to claim your prize: 161 left!

Why spammers are using text messages now?

Most of the time, the reason spammers are going to text spamming now is that it is far easier to spam you on your text message then to use email.   Hey let’s face it who is going to report the spam and who do you report it them too?  These are the reasons why spammers are going to go this route, it is much harder to block or report these spam messages and they know it.  So I figured if they are going to send messages my way, I’d send messages to the right provider and thus I went back to my old post about reporting text message spam.

I’m looking for Android Apps that do this!

I’ve been searching around for an app that does this, but most of them just block it and don’t really report it! I’d really want to make it hard for the spammers to want to send text messages.   Right now the cost of sending text spam is low but if it starts to make it less profitable they will go somewhere else to spam.

Some of the Apps that I will try are:

 

  • Handcent SMS — Handcent SMS is a powerful free sms/mms tools for your android phone.  The most popular messaging app on the Android Market, Handcent SMS is a powerful, customizable, and free SMS/MMS app that fully unleashes the messaging potential of Android devices.
  • Mr. Number Text, Call & Block — Text and call the people you love. Block everyone else.  Mr. Number is a messenger, dialer, and contact manager with built-in call and text blocking (free application) and automatic reverse lookup for numbers you don’t know (Caller ID).
  • Phone Spam Blocker —  NUMBERCOP blocks spam calls and text from 50.000 telemarketers & scam artists Getting SPAM CALLS or TEXT SMS SPAM ? NUMBERCOP is the easiest way to block them. NUMBERCOP knows 50.000 spamming phone numbers: Phone scams, phishing calls and annoying telemarketers.  NUMBERCOP blocks spam calls and text from 50.000 telemarketers & scam artistsGetting SPAM CALLS or TEXT SMS SPAM ? NUMBERCOP is the easiest way to block them. NUMBERCOP knows 50.000 spamming phone numbers: Phone scams, phishing calls and annoying telemarketers.

As you can tell some of these that I’ve found do check caller ID but I am hoping that it will be easier to find the carrier that is being used to spam but at least these do have some ways to block text spam SMS.   My only hope is that someone app developer will come up with a way to report text spam messages to the right company and thus making it extremely hard to send text messages and the cost would out way spamming people.

Paul Sylvester

 

 

 

 

Google Creates the ultimate Search Wiki!!

Google has started to do let people rate the searches and help find the better articles. Google is calling it Searchwiki. Here is a screen shot:

[ad#ad2-left]You can now help judge and rate search results.   You can also X out the ones that are not right.   I am going to play around with this even more.  It started out on Google Trends and Now people are all wanting to know more about this.   This could help my site even more.   I want to know what others are thinking about this?  Is this Good or can this be good for the spammers?  You decide.

Some other Websites talking about this are:

These are just a few but I wanted to let you see what other websites are talking about this new feature. I do want to hear what you think about all this and what is likely to come later on?